My Grandfather Clock Tolls At The Wrong Time

You are aging. Even if you won’t admit it, you’re afraid. Like a young girl worried of loosing her beauty to acne scars and kisses from the wrong boy – but back aches and wrong wives. The drugs you do won’t amount to the adventures you used to have. It won’t bring them back and not eating will just make you decay faster; the skin falling off your muscles while you realize there is no back bone to be found. There is nothing here for you and I know your motives. One last big move to bring everything back although the only thing the future holds for you is acceptance – but soon you’ll forget that. You’ll forget it all. Standing before me in too loose and too old fleece pyjamas, preaching to me about youth and art and beauty like I’m not the one representing it. Making desperate attempts in your speeches and rants to hide the terror that whittles away at you; life smoking you slowly like the joints you roll as we talk. But there is no high like the satisfaction that someone is looking through you because this old man before me knows better than anyone that we spend our whole lives perfecting our mask just to find someone who sees through it. I hope you were surprised when it was me. You used to be wild. Now you’re just crazy and the man I thought you were has burned down to show me the man you are. I don’t revere you. I don’t look up to you. Although I listen, it’s only because I’ve heard it before. Reckless and abandoned as you have ever been, you were the first to sense I would leave. There is nothing here for me like I imagined, just the same as you. But I can escape and I won’t let you live vicariously. So I sit with my patience and my drugs and listen. We ride until there’s no more breath (or for you, no more battery), and I already miss you. You don’t know it. I already miss you because you know I won’t have the time for it after this is over. But when you are quiet I don’t miss you anymore, we’re both gone & we both know it. In your too loose pyjama set, your too loose morals are set free when you tell me secrets I don’t want to know. But they are mine now old man, mine to keep and breathe from because even though you are here, you are gone with the wind you try to shelter as you light another. There’s no going back and no one to take you there. The wrong intentions with the right person. But also the right intentions with the wrong person. You had so much more coming for you and reality came in like a harsh babysitter that life never fired – it just keeps paying its dues. Constantly controlling your actions. These people that you love only because you have to, and me – the only one you loved because you couldn’t help it. And I love you too, but it’s because I want to. I hate you the same and it’s something I can’t prevent. I don’t revere you. I am disappointed and I can’t be bought, but Jesus know’s you’ll try – so does God if you believe in that – and I won’t step in to stop you even though I’d be stepping back in line. Maybe that makes us the same. Or maybe it proves how different we are. It doesn’t matter. You are lost and I am gone, but the difference is only one of us can come back. I don’t think I will.